Leaked drivers reveal upcoming Nvidia kit

Leaked drivers reveal upcoming Nvidia kit - 07/06/0503:33 PM

Nvidia has a raft of new items on the way, if product names embedded in a leaked copy of its latest ForceWare drivers are anything to go by.

The software apparently mentions the as-yet-unreleased G72 - undoubtedly a variant of the recently shipped G70, better known now as the GeForce 7800 GTX - as is the G70GL, also listed in the driver, according to a number of hardware fan sites.

Also mentioned are the GeForce 6600 LE, the NV48 and the Quadro FX 4500. NV48 is likely to be a lower-end GeForce 6 series part, all of which originally sported NV4x codenames. Past reports suggest the NV48 may be an GeForce 6800 Ultra with support for 512MB of graphics memory.

On the chipset side, ForceWare 80.40 lists the nForce 4 C51. According to a separate DigiTimes report, citing unnamed Taiwanese motherboard maker sources, the C51 will ship in volume mid-Q3. The part will apparently push the AMD-oriented chipset down into the mainstream from Nvidia's traditionally high-end territory.

The C51 has been said to support both Socket 754 and Socket 939 processors. There's an integrated variant, according to reports published in May, and all C51 chipsets will support Serial ATA 2, Gigabit Ethernet, Firewire and USB 2.0.